The NROL-42 spy satellite was launched atop an Atlas V rocket from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base early on Sunday morning, Eastern time. And while we don’t know anything about the tech specs or what it will be spying on, it’s a safe bet to say that it’s part of the most advanced spying apparatus the world has…

To most people, hurricanes are to be avoided at all cost. The thought of intentionally flying an airplane directly into a hurricane is quickly dismissed as a very bad idea. Yet there are small groups of aircrew and scientists who regularly board planes that will not only penetrate the storm but will spend hours…

The US Air Force’s secretive X-37B spaceplane returned to Earth back in May after a mysterious two years in orbit. Nobody knows what it was doing up there, since the mission is highly classified, but it’s heading back into orbit in just a couple of days. And this time it’s getting a little help from SpaceX.

The United States is getting a brand-new bomber, called the B-21, for the first time since the 1990s. That’s normally the sort of thing defense-minded types like to hear, but U.S. Air Force programs of the past few decades have a tendency to go completely off the rails. These are the questions that the American…

Plenty of landowners have fought the government over plans to seize their property. But the Sheahan family of Nevada have not spent decades defendingsome mundane corner of farmland from being covered by a proposed interstate. The Sheahans’ ancestral mining land is getting seized over its very unique next-door…

During its first trial launch tonight, the U.S. Air Force’s experimental Super Strypi did not make it to space. Instead, it seems to have suffered a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ somewhere over Hawaii, which in normal-people speak means the $45 million rocket blew up.

I wouldn’t want to stand in front of a fighter jet like this or see one in my rear view for fear of soiling my pants. The F-16 is just on the ground and undergoing pre-flight inspection and it still has such a commanding presence. Killer machine birds.

The U.S. Air Force has announced that SpaceX is now certified to launch military and spy satellites. That means that the United Launch Alliance, a joint effort between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, no longer holds the monopoly on national security space missions.

I never get sick of photos of the USAF Thunderbirds doing their thing because they make real life look way cooler than any sort of movie or video game or fake effects. This picture of four Thunderbirds doing the “Diamond Bottom Up Pass maneuver” is taken at such an angle that they don’t even look like planes.

The F-35 Lightning II is a comically expensive fighter jet with a host of problems but one thing you can’t deny: it can sure look badass. Like badass in the being able to see a glimpse of the future today badass. Like badass as in this flying killer machine totally looks like it’s from a sci-fi movie badass. Like…

Here’s a really cool photo showing US Army and British paratroopers jumping out of C-130J Super Hercules airplanes in a line at Fort Bragg. It was the largest jump exercise in 20 years at Fort Bragg and there are so many paratroopers filling the sky that it looks like a floating human wall (okay, a fence?) has been…

What a perfect picture. The timing is perfect, the angle is perfect, the sky is perfect, the F-16 Fighting Falcons are perfect. I mean, the photo is so perfect that it almost doesn't feel real. Like they've been CGI'd to look like that. Or that they're toy models strung in the air. But nope, they're real. And they're…

Here are twelve KC-135 Stratotanker refueling airplanes all lined up on the runway like a dozen ducks in a row. It was part of an aerial exercise at the Kadena Air Base in Japan where the Stratotankers pumped 50 aircraft with 800,000 pounds of fuel.

I love this spectacular picture of the US Air Force Thunderbirds flying in perfect unison into the sky because the trail they leave behind look like the fingers of a cloud monster giving the jets a boost into the air. And because they're above the clouds, it almost looks like they're flying on a Hoth-like different…

Seven C-17 Globemaster IIIs deploy flares over the Nevada Test and Training Range on Nellis Air Force Base. The photograph was taken during the U.S. Air Force Weapons School's Joint Forcible Entry Exercise 14B on December 6th 2014. Have you seen a better promise of air power recently? [Senior Airman Thomas…

A spectral sunset over a creepy war plane. Airmen from the 1st Special Operations Aircraft Maintenance Squadron work on an AC-130U Spooky Gunship at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California on November 3rd. [Senior Airman Christopher Callaway/U.S. Air Force]

It never gets old. My mind never stops being blown. The US Air Force pilots who somehow fly their Thunderbird F-16s so impossibly close like this will never become any less impressive. I wouldn't even walk this close to another human, let alone touch tails in mid-air.

The unfolding drama between Russia and the Ukraine along the Crimean peninsula is developing, rapidly and unpredictably—certainly not in-sync with the orbits of our overhead surveillance assets. But if we could somehow get a few purpose-built (and presumably rapidly-prototyped) cube sats up there, the US Air Force…